Recruitment events

Fly the flag for physics teaching by promoting your teacher-training options to undergraduates in your university! Holding an open day for your training course is a great way to boost application numbers.

We have developed a series of events that give physics and engineering students an insight into teaching. Below we share our best practice to help you run a successful campus event.

Few undergraduates know exactly what they want to do career-wise, even in their final year. Physics graduates are highly sought-after: recruiters from the corporate sector leap at the opportunity to meet them. This makes it easy for students to overlook teaching as an alternative, yet equally exciting and fulfilling, career option. Engineers also have a similar skillset as physicists; they too are bombarded with the same sorts of companies offering various career opportunities.

If your institution doesn’t have a physics or engineering department, this doesn’t mean that the opportunities are over for you. Investigate your neighbouring institutions. Some don’t have education departments, so working together can be a win-win scenario for both.

The IOP regularly holds Insight into Teaching Physics events in physics and engineering departments throughout the UK. They’re well attended, informative and receive great feedback from students. Our experience has enabled us to develop an efficient and thorough plan of attack for organising these events. You can view the upcoming events on our calendar.

We’re confident that, with the right level of support and planning, you can run your own Insight into Teaching Physics events. We hope you will find them surprisingly effective and cost-efficient.

Below is our advice for organising your own event.

Planning your recruitment event

To help you with your organisation and event running we have produced a downloadable PDF pack, this includes how to structure, promote and keep in contact with attendees following your recruitment event.

We hope you find this useful and informative, please email teach@iop.org if you have any queries or suggestions.

Attending recruitment events and career fairs

If you are planning to attend a DfE ‘Train to teach event’ then you may think about emailing any interest candidates to invite them along. It is a good idea to bring a sign-up form to collect the data of prospective teachers so you can invite them to your future recruitment events.

Attending career fairs is a useful way to meet recent graduates and final year students. Use prospects.ac.uk to find out where these events are taking place.

If you think we could deliver an Insight into Teaching event at your university, or if there is anything we can do to help with your own event, please get in touch by emailing teach@iop.org.